Back in the days, measurements came before actions - one maps out the
territory before doing anything in it. In other cases, measuring something or
something is the action itself - I venture into a new world for the sole
purpose of comprehending it. She becomes mine, as I size her up and down,
pretending to be just sipping my drink. Talking about when the visual becomes
physical. Measured are skins and lands out of which the new departs. New shoes
or development projects.

Belated measurements, on the other hand, are much grimmer. For the sake
of preserving a dead body or a ruin, for the sake of properly conducting a
funeral, one takes a belated measurement of another. It means, more often than
not, a death, murderous or natural, to be dropped six feet under; a desolated
building, bombed or squatted, to be listed later on as a glorified piece of
history. The scale of the matter, so it
is acknowledged, has to do with the completeness, totality and integrity of the
thing, above or below whose presence are numbers and pages.

Trained in photography, Sun Shi has been familiarised with places and
spaces. She is known for taking measurements - many of your galleries, museums
and project spaces know this - with her cameras, long before she came to Wyoming,
back in China. Sizing up and down an exhibition space, a hidden chamber (the
37th), or a natural landscape, leaving traces and marks with pens, papers,
photographs, prints, metals, other means. Feeling it up; to delineate the
externalising process of the thing and of herself.

Here in her own way - distanced from her previous practises, to a
greater extent - Sun actualises the Wyoming Project. By means that come close
to the masonic, the Koon-y, the Kapoor-y, and even the Blake-y, she changes the project, and the
space that it currently occupies. Talking about an economy of shows: when,
where and why should a project space do this or that show? Honestly, we don’t have the answer. What we do know
is when it comes to quantum gravity, string theory might or might not be a dead
end.

Project spaces might or might not be a dead end. Over the years, we have
seen so many new or old faces trying things out for whatever personal or grand
reasons, have seen numerous waves of determined practitioners opening and
closing shops. Celebrated, professionalised, sanctioned, theorised, strategised,
institutionalised, commercialised, historicised, canonised, criticised,
ridiculed, condemned, defamed, banned, bankrupted, people come and go. We still tend
to anticipate the arrival of something new - seemingly the new is never too
late - and do not want to easily forget those who have completed their
historical missions and retired into somewhere else - maybe a bit too soon.

A space should be created, and a show should be staged, whenever and
wherever there are questions, proposals, passions, inspirations, the will to create and
the urge to change, whenever there are jokes to tell, or at least whenever
there is beer. We do have beer here. And, it is never too late to measure the
already old, neither.

Founded in 2017, Wyoming Project sometimes does exhibitions and
publications.